Brave New World

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Ending is better than mending.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Can you say something about nothing?”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.”

― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)